night [OE] Although an Old English word, night comes ultimately from the same root as Latin nox, the source of equinox [LME] and nocturnal [LME]. Fortnight [OE] is an Old English contraction of ‘fourteen nights’, and reflects an ancient Germanic custom of reckoning time by nights rather than days. The original night of the long knives was the legendary massacre of the Britons by the Saxon leader Hengist in 472. According to the 12th-century Welsh chronicler Geoffrey of Monmouth, the Saxons attended a meeting armed with long knives, and when a prearranged signal was given each Saxon drew his weapon and killed the Briton seated next to him. It is first recorded as the ‘treason of the long knives’ in the early 17th century. The phrase is now more commonly associated with the brutal suppression of the Brownshirts (a Nazi militia replaced by the SS) on Hitler’s orders in 1934. It is also used of any decisive or ruthless sacking. Nightmares are nothing to do with horses. In the Middle Ages a nightmare [ME] was thought of as an evil female spirit or monster that lay on sleeping people and suffocated them: the -mare part comes from Old English and meant ‘suffocating evil spirit’.